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We’re the world’s best: it’s not rocket science

Britain is looking for growth. It must exploit its brilliant scientists more single-mindedly

Alice Thomson

July 4 2012, 1:01am, The Times

‘We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star but we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special,” Stephen Hawking once said.

Today we will discover whether deep beneath the Swiss countryside, for less than one trillionth of a second, science’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson, has finally been discovered in the Large Hadron Collider, bringing us one step closer to understanding the world. The hunt for the “God particle” has already taken 50 years and its discovery would be a triumph for physics by providing the final piece of the Standard Model, the theory of how the universe works.

Meanwhile the search goes on for the economic holy grail — the growth particle.…